The 25th Day
by Sideris
Summary: Crawling through the end of the world creates grim understanding out of nothing. Revised 1/10/2012


**Disclaimer: **This is a work of fan fiction. The author does not own anything concerning Gainax's IP Neon Genesis Evangelion. The company gives the word and this comes down.

The 25th Day

* * *

**13**

The city was dead and still.

"So cold," Mayumi whispered, huddled closer to her companion under the leanto. Wind whistled through holes in the plastic tarpaulin. Nothing to hear but spiteful wind and the eerie groan of collapsing masonry somewhere in the nearest city valleys. They hardly kept warm so great was the wind. The tarp was all they could find in their flight from the shores days ago.

Neither wanted to scavenge the deathly quiet buildings looming all around them. Too many taboos of societal norms reined them in.

Wanderers they were, trapped in a broken city-in-a-bottle, praying for the stopper to be loosed so that they could see the real world again.

How many days had passed since she broke the surface of the ocean? Since she left her mother and father? Images of their brilliant smiling faces dipped her dreams in a warm, soothing sensation like warm milk. It was some of the only peace she could find in all of this. Such preternatural quiet. She hated silence and prayed for the moments when her companion would next speak. He was so silent, and she knew why. There were reasons, terrible reasons. She had seen enough while part of Humanity.

Shaking, bruised fingers gripped his narrow shoulders and _squeezed_. She loved personal contact, leeching heat from it. Her chapped lips burned as she spoke his name. Shook him.

"Shinji?"

Here, but not _here_. Blurry, wide eyes stared past their enclosure and everything else. Mayumi couldn't fathom being distant like that, the vestibular paths her thoughts traveled were breathing things and commanded attention. her world was here, now. But what could she say to him? It'll be all right? We'll make it? That they _chose_ to come back to this desolation? She could never tell him that. Could she?

That she chose _him_.

Somewhere deep inside, he knew. Sure as the sun comes up. Nothing was hidden in there. Nothing.

He knew. Knew that his face was the first thing she saw when Impact occurred.

Holding her, smiling, and suddenly, there was her family. Waiting there, impossibly _alive. _Alive as dreams are alive. There were times she wished she never washed ashore to live again. Such terrible thoughts. Rich and bittersweet. Her fingers slipped around his slim arm and she folded against him for warmth. The bitterness washed away just like that. She drifted, and thought of her family, cheek resting against his shoulder.

He never noticed, or cared, how close she got to him. Not like months past when they had choice in the matter. Mayumi never knew the world could become so _cold _and _lifeless._

"I'm okay," he said, after silence lasting an hour. Mayumi jumped at his voice, raspy with disuse. "Just tired."

"I'm hungry," she said.

A wan smile stitched across his face. His face drawn, skin flaky and windburnt.

"Me too."

She tried to focus on him, half succeeded. Her eyes strained painfully against the watery splash in her vision. The left lens of her glasses broke a month ago. A few days ago? Time was weird now. Her watch had dates on it, but she had no clue how long she'd actually been...away...with her family. Or how long Shinji sat upon that beach.

Or how long the other girl had left him behind.

There was nothing left undamaged near the shore. Canted skyscrapers, broken asphalt, vacated homes, (miraculously) throbbing lights at crosswalks, and signs of the dead, and dead, and dead. She glimpsed trees covering the mountains a week ago, where there had been but barren hills. It thrilled her; it terrified her. Should they flee the city altogether for the restored forests?

What would stop them from running back into the red waters and that giant, rotting face? Bile billowed up in her throat. The stench from that _thing's_ decaying girth swept inland like something alive when the winds were right. Without fail, it drove them to violent retching.

Whatever it was, it had taken Ayanami's face. Its smile impossibly wide, manic. That made it worse. Smiles should not be so horrid. She refused to look out to sea at night. That pale flesh glowed bright as bloodied moon.

"What happened?" She muttered, as she always did, ignoring the pain that overcame him just this once. Just this once. He said 'no' to the world. She could to him. Eyes shut. Strange shudder that trembled his limbs and clouded his face. Just this once, she could say no to his pain.

Her eyes clamped shut, all weeping forestalled by will alone.

* * *

The dream was always the same. The most vivid details are in ambiance. The dripping candles on the table, the rough textured walls pocked with flickering shadows. Painted with moving pictures of winters she'd never seen. The red heart of candle flame, beating like a heart, captured her attention nearly more than the occupants beside her - her parents.

Sitting there in the dining room with Mother and Father. That bitter cold night before they moved from their house in sleepy Saku to Tokyo-03. A raging thunderstorm had knocked out power. Father brought out the candles and came up with family time in candlelight, huddling around the kotatsu. Torrential rain gripped the house with something akin to winter's ghost.

Pleasant silence followed. Broken only by mother and father talking about nothing, father's paper dog-eared and half-folded in his hands. Mother clasping her steaming coffee cup, watching her reflection like a shy teenager. They'd always been like that, same lovesick teens beginning to end. Rare. In her memories, in reality. Diamonds in the expendable heaps of coal emotions had become in the World-after-Impact.

She stared at them both from the end of the table, chopsticks raised halfway, the sliver of chicken skewered there cooling unmourned. Disbelief. That alone overwhelmed her first minutes, days, weeks, when all became one. The dream translated it so well.

_Here they are again. _Her mind reeled. And yet she never saw their faces. Always looking down, looking away.

How did she get home?

That inevitable thought always soured the dream. Unwanted lucidity. Her parents rounded on her, betrayal slipping through their faces like worms. Hidden eyes. Like they had heard her thoughts. Maybe they did, just as she heard Shinji's and the billions more in aggregation. Even now, out of the sea, they could still hear her thoughts, brew up with disappointment over and over again.

"Aren't you glad to be home, May-May?" Father would ask.

"O-Of course," she'd reply, jerking her head in agreement.

"Of course. Such a good girl. Eat your dinner." Mother chided, shoveling more rice into the tiny hollow of her mouth. And then always, always train bells began sounding all around her. The room strobes in umber darkness. Sudden guests for dinner. The Girl Who Walked Away.

And then she'd wake up.

The cleanliness of home gave way to the greasiness of her hair and the grit in her clothing; hardwood floors to gravel under the gnarled blanket they slept on; the warmth of the kotatsu sucked away for the cavern-chill running through the leanto. Candlelight to labyrinthine darkness. Shinji shifted next to her. The cause of all of this. He looked peaceful then.

A unwholesome thrill electrified the thought, singed her nerves. She listened to distant thunder and the carom cracking off the back of the shattered buildings around her.

Wakefulness squeezed her mind like an orange and rid itself of bitter rind.

Nothing could wholly explain what compelled her staying behind in Tokyo-03 after the death of her family. Living off the kindness of friends, people with brimming eyes full of pity. Judging eyes. But all kindness faded quickly with devastation. Everyone for themselves. Panic gripped. People motivated only people, compelled them to action.

What compelled _her_ now?

Shinji? The sea?

Before the dream becamereal, nothing motivated her. Simple listlessness carried her through the days of begging, days of outrage. Sleeping as vagrants sleep, out of the way and out of mind. Even in the homes of 'friends' did she sleep thus. It wore her down, made mockery of her pride. The quiet stares and guarded questions harried her from couch to hospice to an abandoned apartment in Maru Ward.

One day, _the_ day, she decided she would finally leave. Leave this dead, festering city. Taking what meager possessions she had left and Yamagishi Mayumi would strike out on her own.

Some of that pride returned long enough to be stolen when the world became as liquid and salt.

She'd been sitting in the middle of Yasogawa station just outside Gotenba, still staring over at the mountain like she could see through the rock and trees to Tokyo-03. She had been among the last wave of refugees to leave the city. The little _hikkimori _suddenly tossed out into the madness. Lost little children weren't children in the eyes of those who shoved, trampled, and screamed their way onto the last train from Gotenba. They were nothing.

Miraculously, she never saw the blast that wiped the city from the earth.

A little girl of four began tugging on Mayumi's skirts, begging to find her mother. People choked the platform with limbs, panicked cell phone calls, horrendous weeping. Holding her, she knew not where to start. Then, with an eerie sense of premonition, the world held its breath. Overwhelming light. Eardrums burst. The little girl screamed, clapped trembling, smoking hands to flash-seared eyes, jerking and screaming in her ear.

The flash burns on the back of Mayumi's neck blistered, carbonized as she and a thousand others watched the mushroom cloud rise and rise and rise from the city for unknown minutes to pierce hollow skies. Sightless wounded wailed in chorus.

Now comes the distant thunder of artillery and keening jet-whine like children screaming. Little winks of lights thrown up from buzzing military jets. They were thick as flies around the mushroom cloud. Fire swept serpentine on the hills. Lake Ashino boiled. People surged off the platform screaming like spring lambs. Mayumi struggled to heft the maimed child, all bloody shaking limbs and silent terror. To run for help.

Anywhere.

Knocked down before they made it twenty yards, the pair rolled into a drainage ditch alongside the tracks. Covered in muck and rainwater. They curled into themselves, away from the world and wailed.

_This-isnt-happening-this-isnt-happening-momma-please!_

Mayumi listened to distant calamity. The susuruss of rocket fire. Chugging machine guns. The raspy chanting of the fires engulfing the mountains that braced a paper horizon. Everything sounded rewound.

Eyes opened dead to the world. To the jets overhead screaming murder and feeling boulder-heavy thumps of autocannon fire sweeping the maglev platform, the crowds of running people. Explosions spit blood and jerking flesh across the sky.

For a time, nothing discernable happened. The little girl clung to her, eerily silent and wetting Mayumi's shirt with tears and herself with panic. Time passed. Both of them caked in mud and filth. Her glasses webbed with cracks. The little girl's eyes dead and her mouth working like a fish's.

From afar, a great mournful wail filled the air. Childlike screams grew louder. So alien, so familiar. How could such things happen? Light washed over them along with the most calming, most pure feeling of euphoria she'd ever experienced.

The ground crumbled to dust underneath them even as something obscene and huge beyond her capacity to understand rose from the ground. Her skin felt like water, wind whipping her flesh as they fell into the sudden abyss. The mountains were gone and the great black sphere rose, blotted out the sun. Falling, falling into the cold nape of the earth. Light overtook them, held them, whispered secret things.

The little girl livened, looked out into the black, screamed and laughed, shrill and gleeful. "Momma!"

Exploded like an overripe melon, covering Mayumi with orange ichor. Before her mind shattered, Shinji was there. _Shinji. _He was falling, smiling, open his arms to take her. Shield her. Clutched in the dark between his arms, face nestled against his neck. There was no shame. It was what she wanted. She pressed her lips desperately to his neck, knowing it was all over. Why hide it now after so long?

She exploded into nothing. And then her dream came true.

Slowly, dispensing with her memories, Mayumi came to her senses and touched the tarp to ground herself. I am here, that sensation said. It was real. It was all real. _Christ, this is not healthy. _Wringing panic out of surging hands, she thought of the way Shinji's chest rose and fell in the cadence only sleepers knew. Anything but the _moment. _

NERV's giant particolored robots. Piloted by kids. Piloted by Shinji Ikari.

She imagined them walking through the JSSDF raid unharmed, killing with impunity as they went. Death clung to them like a breathless follower. She'd lived it, seen her city shatter after every attack by so-called Angels. Mayumi pictured a red giant, rage and sinew, lifting thousands of tons of ship and tossing it like chaff. Grinning two-legged sharks feasting on its entrails minutes later.

Silent prayers stopped the rolling reel of memories. She had touched too many minds in the sea. All the tricks and sensations of the sea never could force Mayumi to enter those memories twice. She never again wanted to see Soryu's memories.

The Girl Who Walked Away. She never knew Soryu. Not really. No one did. Not a word passed between them in that long year after Soryu joined their class.

What could she ask Shinji about her or why she left now? The sadness that wracked him was too powerful. It shamed Mayumi to even think of asking such a question. How selfish.

Father had taught her better than that. '_Respect all privacy, May-May.' _The Aggregate obliterated that with every memory, every thing about a person could be observed, perved upon like bad reality TV.

The death of Soryu and the death of so many others. The massacre at the station. What had they done underneath Tokyo-03 to deserve this horror? She saw images of people wreathed in flaming diesel fuel, shot to pieces by faceless commandos acting in the old Pacific manner, the dying gagging on their own blood. Mayumi remembered a young woman crumpled under a desk crying for help; a thousand anonymous ways to die.

Their names were already _gone_. Smears on a chalkboard. They were still out there in the sea. That little girl, Mari. Out there and happy. Mayumi shuddered, looked to the soft rise and fall of Ikari's chest for reassurance.

"Shinji. _Shinji_."

"Nnn? Mmm?" He jerked awake, scrabbling against plastic, slapped her away. Those eyes caged with an animal's fear. Slowly, he focused and saw that she was _there. _"What-what? Something wrong?" He rubbed his neck and listened to the wind outside.

"_No_. No, I'm sorry. I was just-"

"-thinking about what happened."

Mayumi nodded. "Yeah. I know it wasn't you."

"It was me... That's enough. I let it all happen. Impact...the people." He sat up and wiped his hands on thoroughly frayed tatters that once was a shirt. Drawing ash-stained streaks across his bottom lip, the distant thoughts took him. "...everybody just die." Something inscrutable shook him. A scene she remembered all too clearly. Ayanami straddling him like something wanton.

Whispering to him those words.

"Then, wh-what are those hands for?" Mayumi said, clipping the hitch rising up at the back of her throat. The resonance struck her bodily. Does he really know how much he has destroyed? How much he took from the world? From _her_? All these words swam round inside and there was nothing to say. '_Typical Mayumi_,' her Mother's chiding words crashed through what passed for Mayumi's thoughts.

Ash rained down from billowing clouds overhead.

* * *

Night approached. Stars glinted. Mayumi felt useless, due to her glasses all she could do was sit at night unless they had enough light. Even then it was treacherous, too much glare in the lense.

Shinji lifted the flap and peered out at a car nearby covered in a small mountain of rubble. She watched images of him play in her eyes like mirrors turned to one another, one eye crystal clear, the other blurry. Like punctured two-in-one 3D glasses.

She wondered if anyone else had crawled from the sea yet. Wondered if they too missed blue skies and wondered yet further at what they left behind themselves.

Shinji dropped the flap and vanished into the blur of her left eye. Shifting catlike, he scooted closer and drew up the sheet of plastic they used for a blanket, wrapping their bodies carefully. She let her weight settle on his shoulder, stone-weary and in no mood for nervous skittering. The glasses slipped off. The sudden isolation from people into an impressionistic world never failed to clench her bowels.

"Ruined," Mayumi said, sighing.

"Yes." He whispered.

* * *

"How long have you been back?" He asked her one day, sitting on reclaimed stools from a burned out soba kiosk. The noodles survived and the propane line was still connected. That mystified them. Boiled noodles were a God-send in this place and the food was savory.

Mayumi slurped a mouthful down. "I don't know." She checked her watch. "If...this is at all right, thirteen days. I don't even know how it's still working. And it was New Year's Eve, wasn't it? I don't think it's December again." She flicked the screen. Watched the face gleam its brilliant DayGlo green.

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"Yeah, it's something to keep track of the days. I've hardly paid attention to the sunrises." He looked up into the ruddy noonday, the red smear in the sky turned the sun bronze and ominous.

"Do you think anyone else has come back?"

"Not yet."

"Mmm. That's good." she said.

"Is it?" he said, looked around at the ruins.

"Yeah, we're cold. But we have all the time in the world to talk; I never knew you in school. Not really." Her feet kicked to and fro without care like it was normal days again and they were not surrounded by the ruins of city blocks. "We could change that."

"I know. ...I know." Sighing, he went back to his bowl and refused eye contact.

* * *

**17**

Delegations of lightning visited in the night. The storm barreled down from the mountains like a thundering set-piece from Kurosawa. The rain's cavalry hooves on the hillsides. Flares of cannon-lightning casting crooked shadows across the tops of trees. Gutters overflowed with bloody water. The air stank of sewers and lost peoples. They moved deeper into the city with lingering distrust of expectations. More of the blocks inland were better preserved. Less chaotic wear and tear had taken hold.

They huddled beneath the many arms of an old oak in a nameless city park and doing their best to ignore the piles of clothing in the street. A button-down shirt ran like a child's boat in the runoff. Huddled with a fresh blanket stolen from an overturned car, they ate.

"They say that water is absolutely sterilized," Mayumi said. She watched her reflection blur and ripple in nearby puddles a thousand times over.

"It is. Used to be blue or clear or whatever. Second Impact changed it." He said, shivering, kept close to her. How things change.

They stand eating rice out of tins cooked only yesterday over a trashcan fire. Mayumi had only read of such things in books or watched in cop serials. She missed her rice cooker. Every time it'd be ten minutes until perfect, stick rice. There'd be none of this picking burnt kernels out of the tin like a choosy pigeon. The city was quiet but for the tunnel-roar of rain. Red runoff overflowing the gutters with chips of cracked macadam greasy and alive like sealskin. Mayumi spent long stretches of time under the blanket just watching it pour. Nature moved on.

"I don't know if any of it'll ever make sense," she said, watching their breath plume in the air. She held a hand out, gathered cool water and cleaned her face with the not-blood. Shinji watched her for a long moment, did the same. Nodded, "I'm used to the scent of it. It's nothing strange to me."

"I remember it bothered you."

A tiny red river sluiced from the street off into the park, between them and soaking the ground to clay. Many forks and branches created little deltas nearby. The flash flood would carry them off if they didn't soon move. Nothing about the idea scared her.

"I'm glad." He finally said.

"Why would you be glad?" She looked at him and ignored the chilling damp ruining their blanket's purpose. For that split second, she wished they had broken their taboo about entering buildings. They were as hollow as the buildings. Just as cold, just as impassive. Warmth abandoned them both. They're kindred spirits. Why couldn't they live in their fellow's house?

"I don't know anyone who can get used to that smell...save two. One just...accepted it and the other wallowed in it. Or acted like she did. I dunno, she showered more times a day than I did. Who likes smelling like clotted blood?"

Strange humors overtake. By his own admissions, he acknowledged her in some deeper way. Showed some tacit approval of her memories. He could have summoned it up, she imagined. Just plucked the thought from her head. Of course, he'd seen _everything. _She huddled closer, inching wormlike with her feet. She didn't want to be alone here, not for any appreciable time.

"I can like it," she proffered,"if it makes you feel better." A lifeline in words. The storm withdrew inside him. Drawing back, looked up with wary eyes.

"It wouldn't," he whispered.

"Ah." She glanced down at her rice and shoveled in blackened kernels, ignoring the bitter tang of blood lacing each mouthful. Chopsticks swirled the milky red water bubbling there, "Then tell me how. Don't shut me out like that Shinji."

"I...don't know how," he said, face hollow and pitiable. He scraped out the last bits of sticky rice and licked his fingers with dour resignation hollowing out his eyes again.

"Should I tell you?" Though her smile bled away, little recrimination dwelt within the words. Long silence. She ate the last of her rice and let the can fill with rainwater and gargled; spat rusty water.

"Honestly? Yes."

One giant leap for mankind, she thought.

"Maybe...we can find out together. Live a little, you know? Shinji?" Sound advice of fools and self-help books. Hesitance mocked by the uproar of sheeting rain. Scudding clouds tinted red above them. The clay beneath their feet now a fine burgundy pudding.

She shifted, letting the sopping blanket slide off and turned to kneel before him. Dipping her face like some wayward penitent, trying to force a look out of his blurry face. Something about not seeing his face terrified her. Something familiar. The seconds pass and, uncertain at his response, she begins to panic. But slowly, he lifts the windows of his eyes to meet hers. Her smile shook. "Isn't that why we're back?" she said.

He scraped mismatched chopsticks round the little tin. "Yeah. It is."

"Wanna go inside?"

At first he didn't reply. Then, he said: "Yes."

* * *

**19**

The apartment would have been a greater success sold as a cubby hole instead of a place for human habitation.

The one room mansion was empty and that alone beat the other rooms. Power still on. Water running in the pipes. How long had they been truly gone? Neither of them could say. Rain these past two days, the gutters and sewers now raging rivers, somewhere inside was their only hope of fleeing the waters. It did wonders for their moods even if they stank and looked like vagrants.

Another point boosted their spirits: after weeks wandering the streets, they'd finally gotten their bearings. The dwelt within Odawara. She had seen the knock-kneed Seisho By-Pass after entering the apartments not a day before hooking along the coast. Small miracles.

Before they had found this particular room, they looked everywhere else. There were other rooms, more spacious places, piled with books, canned food, stacks of instant noodle, hot water in the showers, blankets, all that they would need. Along with piles of soiled clothing, thick layers of dust, the remnants of the dead and sea-bound. The discovery of a nightmare crib stained with LCL, and the unnerving silence kept them confined to this small apartment.

They agreed to venture out only for what they need and to return immediately from the quiet, eyeless rooms.

Mayumi demanded Shinji never leave her alone in the apartment and to never leave her side when they walked the halls. "It's like _we're_ the ghosts," she said in the dark of that first night.

Soon, the skies began to clear and the feverish storms broke.

Sunrise over a barren city. The air crisp and free of sickward stink. No promises of birdsong. No noon chirring of once present cicadas. Broken, stripped-branched poplars swaying in the wind up and down the boulevard. Temperature slowly rose with the sun in the beaten blued hues of morning and the deep green and yellow scent like summer came with it. It smelled _normal._

"Small comforts," she said, muttering, leaning out the window to catch a sight of the shifting sky through the pinched teeth of buildings. Never daring to look at the day-lingering bloody moon.

The quiet of things stole her breath. It could be early morning anywhere, she thought, no morning rush; the city still asleep. If she dared to dream, the postman or garbage trucks would come round the corner of the distant intersection with all its now dead-eyed traffic lights and carry on as normal. The first joggers and early train hoppers would start pouring out the buildings and race for normalcy. And if they looked up at the faces of sleeping buildings, they'd see a girl. A broken-eyed girl who looked a wraith in the dawn.

_Normal._

What did that now mean? Fingernails bit deep into the windowsill. A sudden, frightening anger directed at her sleeping companion flooded her limbs. Biting her rage, she turned her soul's eye inward and recounted numbers and lines of poems. A safer path. A _breathing _path. She wondered if there would ever be another morning rush, or sleepy cities, or postmen, or garbage trucks. The world could rest. Pass Humanity's influences off dawn by chary dawn.

_Do well and have no need of ancestors_, she grimaced. She thought of that little girl. Tiny, broken into a misty cloud of orange.

"Shinji."

"Mmm?" He rolled up off the cot and looked at her. "What's wrong?"

"Will we be okay?"

Silence. Then, "I think so. Everyone has to choose." She pictured him fiddling with the blanket behind her, hand in lap, watching it flex in that methodical fashion. "You saw your parents...yeah?"

She tugged at a nimbus of frayed hair. Nervous habits come back so easily. "Yes."

"...I'm sorry."

"I want to live, Shinji."

"So do I."

"Okay."

"Okay."

The narrow bed frame groans as he stands, padded across the tatami to the bathroom. Playing house in the middle of a necropolis. She was hungry. A slow headache crept up on her, hiding behind the eyes. The sputtering sink. She tugged her hair into a ponytail and sat on the cot and wished again for new glasses. It made the headaches worse than normal. With one eye focused, the other's muscles struggled and brewed magnificent migraines after just a few hours.

Still, what they had now was far better than nothing.

She looked down at the new wool sweater, new blue socks, and the ill-fitting pants she wore now. Pilfered from closets eerily devoid of dust or decay. Her first shower after arriving shed pounds of filth off her flesh. Dirt, dried skin, the sticky serum of rainwater, the countless scrapes and bruises washed cleaned under hot water. A blessing. The miracles of good hygiene. Shinji looked somewhat cheered by this windfall.

Small miracles.

"Shinji?"

The water shut off. "Yeah?" Then came the hollow sawing sound of teeth brushed.

"Could we eat in a bit, please?"

"You okay?"

"No."

"Oh..." He ghosted into the doorway wiping his face clean. "What's-" His stutter cut short by a kind smile. His face shaped itself in the manner of pensive men. He was trying. For her. And that was more than she could ever ask. Minutes of silence peeled away in this tabernacle dark.

"Breathe," she suggested. "It's okay."

"What-what's wrong?"

"Everything. And nothing. Especially that nothing part. The real problems are kind of obvious, don't you think?"

"I'll try and cook something."

He walked into the sideboard kitchen, pulled down their foldout table. Set out bowls, lacquered chopsticks. Some small silver forks. Bottles of water from the fridge and packs of instant noodle from the tiny cupboard. Saffron rice. A black cat-shaped (with broken nub ears) pepper shaker. She stood to help. "Anything I can do?"

"The stove?" An actual smile. Timid, but real. She felt she could die.

She lit it, watched blue rings of teeth ignite. They were still too wary to trust the water out of the pipes for anything remotely drinkable, so it was bottled water all the way. Even then, there were questions. Too many questions.

He expects these things, she wondered. Hardbitten anger boiled up inside her. All the frustrations of longing and unanswerable questions. She rounded on him.

"How is all of this still on?" she said, nodding to the bathroom door. "The utilities? Water, _running_ water. _Hot_ water. An entire city was vaporized a few miles away. That GIANT hole in the ground? Power stations. The only ruins _here _are what caught fire or flooded or whatever happened when we were...were gone." A stranger's stolen pot slammed onto the stove. He jumped like a cricket, stared on, horrified.

Shaky fingers set her broken glasses on the foldout and she rubbed at the pain in her head, blindness slowly misting away the world. Shinji became no-one. No thing. Only the impression of a person. "Nothing makes sense. _I'm_ not making sense." she whispered. Blood sang in her ears. She stared anywhere but at him. What was left of him.

"I..." Shinji managed after time. "I don't know. The only people who would really know are still out there. Kensuke. He would know. ...he would know." His voice, all nuance dead. "Tell us all about it when he comes back."

"Not seeing is a flower?" She said, offering some comfort in the old saying.

"Yeah, it would be for him," he said, turning right back around to get to husband boiling noodles. He moved past her with the utmost care and just a wisp of contact. The brush of a shoulder. Quiet, even breaths. The soft belches of a water bottle drained into the pot.

"It'll be done in a minute, okay? Sit when you're ready. I've got this."

Powerful disappointment. The granitic edge to his voice. It settled old hands about her chest and squeezed. The best of intentions, she thought. The onus hers alone. She couldn't speak; she'd simply make it worse. What else was there to do now but dwell in the open graves of her thoughts?

* * *

She slept on the cot. He insisted on the floor.

_To hell with chivalry. Share. _

There was little argument, though. He gave it to her without rancor. He even mentioned his surprise at her not fighting over it. Fitful sleep soon after. And so it went. Disappointment wasn't quite the word for how she felt at his admission. In truth, Mayumi didn't know if what she felt had any close relation to disappointment. Troubled, maybe. What could be done?

No moon tonight. A darkling room their world entire. Her glasses rested on the table. She watched the formless dough on the floor rise and fall. Peaceful. He seemed to bake.

Her giggles drowned out the beginnings of mutterings. The whispered names slipping out of his mouth stopped everything. An abiding silence fell. He jerked and scrabbled like a trapped animal. Rising, Mayumi swung her legs off the cot and padded (more felt her way) over to him one careful step at a time. Tapped along with her toes until she brushed warm skin.

Gasping, choking sounds now. Murmurs in the dark. Nightmares again disturbed him. His skin cold to the fire of her palm. He smelled like iodine.

"Shinji," she said. "'Sokay."

Fingers squeezed and began thrashing, seizing. "Let go of me! Let go! LET GO!_ AYANAMI LET GO!" _

Minutes of calming, thrashing, lies and promises. The cool metal rim of the cot. Shaking bodies swaddled in sweat-soaked blankets. Pained tears roll down her cheeks. He calmed by the time bruises showed on her arm and the knot formed on the back of her head. Such apologies like she'd never known. He wept as much as she did, some of it the same reasons, some different. All back to that singular pain everyone knows. It filled her up when he shied away from her hands. Everything was so dim.

"I can't see. I know you're there. Don't do this...don't run. It hurts more than the bumps."

"I'm sorry." The blob-that-was-Shinji laid next to her and she smelled the bitter salt of sweat. A hint of blood from both of them."I..."

"What, Shinji?"

"I'm sorry I hurt you." He touched her. An electric moment. For vertiginous seconds, she was falling again.

"I know you didn't mean it."

A spiderlike limb unfolded and seemingly stretched taffy-like. His fingers brushed the bruises tattooed around her left wrist. She swallowed goldfish gulps of air. "I did this?"

"It barely hurts," she said, and meant it. The goose egg-sized knot hurt more. But it all came down to this moment. The rolling quiet of it. This was her life back in motion. This connection. The nerve of his touch. The overwhelming fear in each probing contact on her wrist. Cherished. How long was he shut off from outside contact? She should have reached for her glasses. But the warmth kept her still.

Her friend corrugated, stretched, gentle fingers withdrew. He chuckled.

"I guess you're right."

* * *

**20**

Choosing him. Could she ever tell him what drew her out of the sea? Should it be the lie; something noble like wanting to see the world again?

Maybe the old sentiment of a thousand movies and plays and otaku anime: I came back just to see the sun shine? Hardly. The sun wasn't the light at the end of the tunnel, only the flicker of a lighter inside a coffin.

For other people? The people she loved were almost all gone. The people she knew were vague impressions left in clay or ash and easily washed away come the rain. Who watched her now, judged her? Shinji? Her parents once took her measure. Both now gone and dead

And the world? The world... It could burn.

All there was, was him.

The watch blinked day twenty of her return. How did it still work? It should be at the bottom of that crater. Swishing feeling behind her eyes, sudden dizziness. A yawning blackness with arms wide open festered in the corner of her thoughts: _Come in. _It said. _We too stare back. _Momentary panic.

She splashed water in her face and stared in the mirror. At the faded, glassy-eyed corpse looking back. Her head gently throbbed, her slim fingers traced out inane gypsy scribbles in the foggy glass.

"Mayumi?" He had his back to her leaning on the door frame, hands stuffed in pockets. Pensive as always.

"I'm okay. Just..."

"Stretched?"

"A bit," she admitted. "I'm sorry for this. Putting a good face on sometimes..."

"Sucks. I know." He turned, met her gaze reflected in the mirror. His smile vague, rueful. Always the somber kid. She turned around and leaned against the cool porcelain of the sink.

At least he related. He would. She'd seen enough to know that. Selfish thoughts, selfish deeds. The world thrives on them. Maybe he was the most selfish person who'd ever lived. She believed that a long time until dipping into the sea. Among all that red memory, she wondered what was the bigger lie: that he was the most selfish, or that she'd just lied to herself for years. Decided then and there that it never mattered. Everything could be fixed. They were just people, after all.

Taking her own advice would be a good start.

* * *

**23**

The china sky held only wind and the ringing in her ears. All her life, ringing in her ears. A tuning fork's sonic screaming in the inner ear. Clouds scudded. Both of them walked, clothed in the morning mist. The coolness of the breeze, her mouth never all the way closed. It tasted sweet and green. The world all a dream. They walked side-by-side down what would be called O-13 if either of them cared to recollect.

They came upon a scene of destruction.

A fallen lamp post in the middle of the road, bent in half by the wide nacelle of a downed military jet. Glittering spall of shredded turbine blades spread across the macadam. The fire-gutted storefront where the rest of the craft had died. Carbonized helmet hanging from a spear of rebar. The melted control panels, the matte blackened steel in sunlight.

The half-imagined scent of LCL burning in the air.

Mayumi shuddered at the sight. Images of the earth churning, people ripping into mist and meat under fire, the long high-pitched scream of the rotary cannon, played out in her head in three-fourths time. She remembered the shocked look on a businessman's face, who ran by the ditch when the guns chewed him up and he scrambled to hold in all the falling blue snakes from his gut. His shirt was on fire and black with blood. He'd started gathering pieces and clumps of dirt to pack the holes.

"Mayumi?" Shinji said, suddenly there at her side, gently squeezing her arm. "Mayumi?"

"They killed so many people," she shuddered, hands bitterly scrubbing at her eyes. "I was in a ditch and so many of these were overhead...just killing everyone."

She heard the scratching flutter of papers flying out of the salaryman's ruined suitcase, flying away like startled quail.

"...come on. Please. We can't stay here." Shinji drug her along, rubbing her back as she tried to pull it together. She felt sick.

* * *

The door was easy to miss at first.

Their wandering had taken them all over the northern stretch of Odawara, roaming entire blocks of undamaged city. The only blemish to the illusion that everyone had simply dropped what they were doing and left was a crashed car. It looked like an exodus not unlike the days when they were children and humanity moved and shifted like a wave all their own. This perfect model city, missing its pulsing heart.

The tanks were what caught their eye. Not tanks, she thought, but something else. Wheeled, quick, and dead. It was Shinji who'd seen the door, looked for it, something, with a will. He looked even pleased when finally he saw it and peeked in.

"What is it?" Shinji glanced back at her and shrugged.

"NERV had all sorts of underground passages in Tokyo-03. But most of the ones people saw where just, uh, power conduits and stuff for the Evas. Underneath the roads. I usually went in through tram stations."

"Those went to the Geo-Front, right?" Mayumi asked, peering into the shadows of the matte green steel door, studying the stamped Apple and Leaf of NERV. **No Trespassing**, it said. A small box with winking green light, the keycard slot, shattered by a pistol laying on the ground there. The dull glint of brass casings made her hackles rise. A premonition of dread.

"Shinji, I dunno..."

"I don't think...we need to worry about anyone else being here."

"Why?" She swept up behind him and peered inside and gasped. "Oh, God..."

The floor was carpeted with uniforms. Many of them torn apart and riddled with holes. Blood long since dried a crusty black. Spent brass littered the floor like small mountains. Rumors of cordite and bodily fluids. Old yellowed stains of blood mingled with LCL spittle. Dozens of them were tan, stitched with the Apple and Leaf.

The nauseating stink of burnt wires and piping; signs here and there of a small inferno. They carefully picked their way down a T-junction, took a left. Scorch marks bruised the walls, the hall littered with the burned ashes of NERV uniforms. Flamethrower pack just around the corner, sitting atop crumpled JSSDF uniforms. Pock marks and lines of bullet impacts, little craters stapling the wall for a hundred yards in every direction. All they heard was the hollow clap of their feet on steel floors.

"Shinji?" Mayumi whispered, wincing at the distorted echo in the tunnel.

"I dunno where we are. I just remember..." He looked at her with those distant eyes, squinted and tense. His left hand twitched spasmodically. Signs of battle bled away quickly as they walked. Whatever this incursion was, it hadn't gotten far. Only the crystal leavings of shot out fluorescent globes here and there. Then after a time, nothing. The soft hum of the lights, their own nervous steps.

Past a service junction, they saw directions to the tram up ahead. 'Be safe and have a nice day!' the signs spouted. Shinji shook his head, incredulous. "I don't remember any of this." They walked as ghosts in the silent complex.

"Well...I don't think you've been to Odawara, Shinji. Just saying."

"No. Guess not."

"The air's stale."

"Mm, yeah. Tram's this way." He pointed up to another sign and shuffled toward a set of escalators. They were stopped, little rigid iron shelves going down. They were as long as the ones in the Geo-Front, he mentioned. Deep black bracketed them.

"Wow...that's a ways down. Will we have to come back up?"

"Probably...we've got some water left, right?"

Two little slivers of sallow flesh they were, whispering down the stairs onto a vacant train platform. A car sat inside the outgoing Tokyo-03 tunnel. Mayumi leaned over the safety rail and looked at it, a vague fear stretched long fingers around her gut. The windows of it carried a twilit orange glow and something dreadfully familiar itched in her memories. It sat there, a predatory thing waiting in its den.

Strange images assailed her: three women standing, staring, talking at Shinji. Ayanami, Soryu, and another. Why had he looked so sad? She turned to him, pivoting still on the rail. Shinji stood rigid at her side, gripping the rails with knuckles bled of color, caged eyes trying to not look at the car.

"Shinji?"

"Let's go... Please." he said.

She didn't bother asking the whys, not understanding the motivations in each jerky movement, the sudden sweat on his face. Least of all her own. That twitching left hand of his gripped her forearm like a vise, pleading to go, to go now and to go quickly.

That's when they felt it. The indistinct _shift _under their feet. The rug pulled out from under them, both slapping hands crazily against the rail for support, Mayumi's arm backpedaling for balance. Something (the tram?) roared in the deep. A pyroclastic shout raging through them, around them, shaking the root of the station's teeth. Alien feelings approaching mortal terror welled up inside her. She screamed when dust began raining down.

And with long minutes gone, the earthquake faded away to nothing. It never happened, the deafening silence seemed to say. Obnoxious alarms pulsed through the halls, red lights strobing wildly.

'_Attention. Attention. Irregular tectonic activity registered at 17:32 hours. All personnel please move to emergency shelters in case of aftershock activity. Attention. Attention.'_

Mayumi stopped screaming and watched the lights warily. "Shinji?"

"Look at that..."

Dust drifted out of the tunnel in curious nimbus. It reached for them with languid hands, grasped them. Coughing, choking. Mayumi listened as fans somewhere overhead sputtered up, sucked the dust out of the tram.

"The line went all the way to Tokyo-03 didn't it," Mayumi choked out.

"Yeah..."

A long moment looking at one another. Thunder roared somewhere distant in the tunnels. The terrible sound of it.

They were halfway up the escalators, running and choking, before the PA calmly intoned incoming aftershocks. The tram car's windows glowed a dull orange as the next plume rushed out of the tunnel and enveloped them.

* * *

"The crater must be having landslides or something," Mayumi coughed, taking a long drink from the water bottle and passed it to Shinji. Kabuki actor Ikari, she thought, face drawn in a deep grimace and caked white with cracking dust. He said nothing. Shaky fingers grasped the bottle of water and drank, sparing not one drop. An absurdly pink tongue darted out between his lips to catch a few errant drops. He spat thick wads of phlegmy dust.

The miniature emergency shelter was colder than a coffin. Above them, the intercom system was alive with the same repeated yellow-code warnings of being aware and checking one's safety stations for any campus-wide damages.

'_Relief crews will arrive shortly from Odawara Private Consultants and NERV Headquarters. Attention. Relief crews...'_

Mayumi had the good grace not to laugh. Her eyes watered and ran trying to sluice the dust out. The pristine halls were coated in nearly an inch of dust and ashes.

Hunger and vague unspoken fears of sitting inside a tomb drove them out into the halls again. What if the power should finally short out? There didn't seem to be any manual release for the doors. They chanced it. The outside halls were quiet as ever. The intercom had even gone silent, so much time had passed. Mayumi wondered. Little capes of dust flowed in their wake. The disquieting spread of dust made her think of walking on eggshell skulls.

They traced back to the old battlefield at the T-junction where they had come in. The dust thankfully thinned out there.

Stepping with minefield slowness over the discarded clothing and assault rifles. Five-point-five-six-millimeter bells jingled with each step. The door out was on their right, down the clothing strewn hall; a cartoonishly small rectangle, a million miles away. For a strange moment, she wondered if it'd stay that small if they tried to leave. Closing with a snap to cement the reality. Trapped underground forever. Only the dizzying hum of the overhead lights and the scattered leavings of the taken to keep them company until starvation ran its course. .

They walked on a bit longer, opting not to leave just yet. Taking careful note of where they were, taking on only a few twists and turns. Maintenance rooms. Small offices with ceilings stained yellow from cigarette smoke. The overpacked sterility of medical laboratories. Long, liquid-cooled freezers marked DUPLICATE SAMPLE COLONY.

A dimly lit waiting room with stocked snack stomachs roared. Dog-eared magazines on a small glass table. Discarded clipboards and reports stamped EYES ONLY on their manila covers. A musty quiet. The rattling malfunction of a fan in the ceiling. A glass bottle of tea sprouting new life from its bacterial swill.

'_Never forget to clean out your fridge.'_

The machines stood like mute soldiers. Coke, Pepsi, a half-dozen Quu machines, Itoen, all the little pleasures they missed. No change nor poor man's credit card in sight.

"We're not exactly the best looters," Mayumi muttered darkly.

"Maybe we'll find a pry bar." Shinji said, his features still tight, his smile a thin dry-erase line in chalk. "Another time."

_The Quu machine will stand no chance then_. Sighing, hungry, they both moved on, taking small sips of water and passing a can of rice topped in aged soy sauce. They made no complaints. All she could picture was a home-cooked meal, the last one she'd shared with her family. It'd been something simple, rice, roast chicken, some side dishes. She couldn't remember what it was, only _that _it was.

* * *

He'd been silent for a long while when she reached over, and touched him.

"We should go."

He jerked his head up, looking her straight in the eyes. Vacant, far-away eyes shining with nightmarish consciousness. Let her see what he saw in the mirror.

"I want to forget it. Everything. I _can't_."He said.

"I know."

"No...you don't." He removed himself from her grip and stood there like some broken thing trying not to make eye contact. "It's all bad dream." He sniffed and failed to regain any composure. He was folding in on himself again.

_I came back for you_. _That's no dream._

They stood there in silence for a long, long while. Unknown minutes. Mayumi carefully, and with agonizing slowness, reached out to grab his hand, and lead him to the door. Not word one. Silence saved so much. That dullness in his eyes infuriated her, enkindled desires to smack him and be done with it and trudge back to the beach and slosh out into those red waters and her family. How would he like to hear that? Would it crush him? A part of her hoped so.

_Breathe. _Mayumi stared ahead, her expression warring against reason. A fist clenched tight inside her chest and _squeezed._

She was going to scream. It was there, waiting, bubbling up from the dark well of things best not remembered. Swimming under the glossy surface. They should never have come here. The self-defence troopers should have just blown in the front door and buried it all.

_I don't mean that. God, I don't mean that, _she mouthed to herself. She was going to cry. When had she become this person? Who had changed her? She looked down at the hand she held.

Doors opened without complaint and she carefully guided him through the switchback maze of halls. Past the maintenance hatches, the locked stores of the waiting room, countless reeking offices, the pseudo-charnel house of the main hall. It was quiet, so desperately quiet. Long midnight fingers made deep inroads against the few shot out lights. A chorus of shadows and blowing ash awaited them.

"It's not a dream." She said, feeling the clench in her chest.

No reply.

"This is real. And you chose to come back. You gave everyone a choice." To weep was easy. Sitting there behind her eyes, a diffuse warmth. "And where are you now? ...Where are you now?"

Did he care? For all the secrets they shared? For the looks? The companionship?

"Where are you _now_?" There would be horrible bruises on his fingers tomorrow. She'd bandage them and that would be as far as guilted caring would take her. They stepped over burnt and shot up clothes, made absurdly careful steps as if bodies still littered the hall. Almost out.

"Here." He rasped.

"Don't lie... Please don't lie." She threw his hand away and stepped outside into the night. The hot feel of a storm coming. The flashes of lightning in the mountains. She smelled rain, deep and thick in the air.

A complete disconnect from reality in human form is what she dealt with. She shook her head and felt the mask of restraint crack. Ragged claws mopped her face of sweat. Everything bled into shadow but him, standing there in the open doorway, expression horrible, backlit by sodium haze.

"I'm..."

She looked at her hand with the clear eye, then removed her glasses. She whipped around on ball-bearing heels, stepped forward, and felt the bite of flesh and a painful throbbing threaded her hand.

"Don't _lie_ to me!_ Don't _do this!_ I CAME _BACK _FOR YOU! I TURNED AWAY FROM MY FAMILY! To be here! I-" _A hoarse, glottal sound killed the words dead.

"...God, for _you_..." A pitiful creature, sobbing with rage, sweeping at watery eyes, begging aloud for them to stop. For the world to stop and take whatever it needed, whatever was left, to take back every word she just said. All too human. This landslide a device of her own creation now.

"You never saw it. You _promised_," she hissed. "_..._to _try_ and do what you came here to do."

The distance between them became incalculable.

"I..."

"Don't say you're sorry. _Don't_. Just don't."

"Okay."

"Do you understand?"

"...yes," he said. "I do."

Her cheeks raw and her fingers shook from the endorphins' kick. Something sharp and plastic slipped into her hands. The glasses slipped on as they always did. Slowly, the world refocused in one eye.

She told him she wanted to go home. He took her.

* * *

**25**

They had talked. Long and into the night. Talks that went for days. Deeply scarred things came to the surface of those talks, were hushed away. They had come to a decision.

Each step felt harder than the one that came before it. They were walking along an upturned and destroyed roadway. The gigantic silhouettes of crosses loomed high above a small rise, above them. Chipper Odawara, Mayumi named it.

A land returned to nothing. The gentle slope of broken asphalt. The broken back of the by-pass. The distant slur of the sea. A rolling red beam against the shore, now drawn away. Icy red combers. The brilliant white of the sand. They were silent, much as they'd been after the talks. It was more comfortable now than before. Mayumi had touched his arm this morning and he hadn't shied away.

Good a sign as any, she thought. Her fingers rested on his arm now. The lame leading the blind to salvation. A crack ran straight down the middle of her good lens. Everything has a price. They grew closer to the hazy red meridian.

Blood sang in her ears, her guts twisted in sailor's knots. Their shoes left on the road.

They took great loping strides down a hill amongst thatches of high grass and seamoss. Reeds rasped against her bare legs. The sea went on forever toward the great bloody arch in the sky. There were no shores on the other side, her mind whispered. No true shores anywhere. _The sea is life_.

She strained his hand of every drop of blood.

"It'll be okay." he said.

"I'm scared." she replied.

"...so am I."

The great crosses bore skeletons dipped in foamy tallow. The shattered head of Ayanami nowhere to be found. Gone as if it had never been. Maybe it hadn't. Maybe all that had been some fever-dream tinged with reality.

The sand, warm and white, ran free between her toes was real enough. She had to do this. What is more, _they_ had to do this. To see this beach once more during the morning hours. Calmer. Saner.

"You're in half."

He looked back at her with an inscrutable face. She hated her glasses all the more, unable to really see his bisected smiles. She'd be blind soon. But there was hope.

They traced that long bight of sand for hours. Looked for tracks inland. Familiar sights. Saw heaps of driftwood here and there. Thumbed a thousand rusted sea shells stained with the waters of life. Heard the soft gurgles of receding tides. Cherished the sinking, wonderful summer feeling of fresh caked sand. It was red and rich and like an unknown clay when the tide rolled out.

It was Shinji who spotted silvery TV antennas sticking out from the surf. A crumbled skyscraper knelt over a small scab of devastation, covered with newly grown plants and rare mangrove. Roots shrugging through masonry and steel.

They both sat and stared a long time at it.

It was Shinji who spotted _her_.

The Girl Who Walked Away sat along the shore as if out of some sudden fever-dream. Arms and hands freshly wrapped in cut up mattress sheets, both stained black. Mayumi held onto his hand and felt as if she were falling again.

Soryu turned to them, squinting in the harsh light of dawn.

A dim blue eye peeked out of ragged red hair, one of her curious hairclips missing. No greater neutral expression had ever been expressed in the whole human race, Mayumi thought. Reluctantly, Mayumi let her fingers slip away until only a finger hooked his left thumb. Her breath came in shuddering hics.

Shinji's thumb began to pulse back and forth and soon, his hand.

Drawing steadiness from the sound of the tide, Mayumi spoke first.

* * *

A/N: Revision! Dear _God_, why hell did I ever let this thing out as it was originally written. _SO AWFUL._ But it's tolerable now, hopefully. Some scenes cut out entirely, everything tightened up far, far better than before.

Honestly, I just revised this to pave the way for Continuous Process, which may be the best writing I've ever done for a fic. I'm really proud of it. It wouldn't have come about without the start granted here. I like Mayumi, I like my take on her. I like my take on Shinji as well. They simply need a bit of brushing up.

Enjoy, folks!


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